Farmers’ leader forecasts N.Z. dollar float

Press, 25 July 1984, Page 3

Farmers’ leader forecasts N.Z. dollar float

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington A forecast that the incoming Labour Government would allow a managed float of the New Zealand dollar, along, with other measures, has been made by the incoming president of Federated Farmers, Mr Peter Elworthy. Mr Elworthy, of South Canterbury, has been acting president of the federation since the outgoing president, Mr W. R. Storey, announced his candidacy for Parliament at the General Election. Mr Elworthy was elected president unopposed at the conference yesterday. He said the federation had been among the first to welcome Labour’s devaluation and the promise that it would be accompanied by a package of policies. However, a note of warning was needed. If various sector groups tried to recover the higher costs arising from the devaluation, the potential benefits would not only be lost but the country would end up in a worse position than without devaluation. He said that the real test of the Government’s wisdom and courage would be in the way it managed this issue. The incoming Government had placed much emphasis on consultation and consensus, and the federation pledged itself to ensure that maximum areas of common interest were iden-

tified so that the areas of difference could be recognised and dealt with in a rational and sensible way. The greater part of the production, processing, marketing, and transport of primary products could and should be handled as part of a common endeavour, Mr Elworthy said. In the traditional pastoral industries, the participants were often cast in role types which locked them into counter-productive behaviour. The unions, initially agents of change and progressiveness, fighting against the established conservatism of capitalism and land ownership, were the modern-day conservatives, he said. These modern-day reactionaries inhibited technological progress in a singleminded, blinkered, and ultimately suicidal attempt to hold or increase jobs at any cost, regardless of profitability or productivity. Paradoxically, the conservatives of the last century, farmers, had adopted positive techniques for extra efficiency from the labour unit, and new and alternative land uses. Mr Elworthy said it was urgent that these roles now blend so that all sectors in the primary production chain shared progressive attitudes and adopted fair reward-sharing. In the past, the main role of Federated Farmers had

been to protect the interests of fanners, often through competition, and sometimes confrontation, with other sectors. Now the federation would try to be involved more often in bringing the different sectors together, acting as a catalyst to achieve co-operation planning of long-term goals of mutual benefit, he said. However, the Government had to know that fanners were not to be “taken for simple suckers” who were expected to increase production with time, effort, risk, and expense for no increase in reward. Devaluation had to be accompanied by other measures, Mr Elworthy said, and by itself would only create substantial increased costs for some agricultural sectors while creating little extra income. Its two most important aspects were that it released fanners from “dripfeed from the taxpayer” and by so doing returned farmers to the influence of market forces and not manmade decisions. “There is joy among young farmers at the end of supplementary minimum prices,” he said. There were young people who had wanted to enter farming as a career but did not want to become part of an industry where they would be made wards of the State, and so suffer the ridicule of those in town.